Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

532 Pages·2010·9.04 MB·English

by  Jacobsen Annie

AREA 51
An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base
ANNIE JACOBSEN
New York Boston London
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
Photo Inserts
Copyright Page
For Kevin
Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal
what is now shining in splendor.
—Horace
PROLOGUE
The Secret City
T
his book is a work of nonfiction. The stories I tell in this narrative are real.
None of the people are invented. Of the seventy-four individuals interviewed for
this book with rare firsthand knowledge of the secret base, thirty-two of them
lived and worked at Area 51.
Area 51 is the nation’s most secret domestic military facility. It is located in
the high desert of southern Nevada, seventy-five miles north of Las Vegas. Its
facilities have been constructed over the past sixty years around a flat, dry lake
bed called Groom Lake. The U.S. government has never admitted it exists.
Key to understanding Area 51 is knowing that it sits inside the largest
government-controlled land parcel in the United States, the Nevada Test and
Training Range. Encompassing 4,687 square miles, this area is just a little
smaller than the state of Connecticut—three times the size of Rhode Island, and
more than twice as big as Delaware. Set inside this enormous expanse is a
smaller parcel of land, 1,350 square miles, called the Nevada Test Site, the only
facility like it in the continental United States. Beginning in 1951, on the orders
of President Harry Truman, 105 nuclear weapons were exploded aboveground at
the site and another 828 were exploded underground in tunnel chambers and
deep, vertical shafts. The last nuclear weapons test on American soil occurred at
the Nevada Test Site on September 23, 1992. The facility contains the largest
amount of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium in the United States not
secured inside a nuclear laboratory.
Area 51 sits just outside the Nevada Test Site, approximately five miles to the
northeast of the northernmost corner, which places it inside the Nevada Test and
Training Range. Because everything that goes on at Area 51, and most of what
goes on at the Nevada Test and Training Range, is classified when it is
happening, this is a book about secrets. Two early projects at Groom Lake have
been declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency: the U-2 spy plane,
declassified in 1998, and the A-12 Oxcart spy plane, declassified in 2007. And
yet in thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports, the name Area 51 is
always redacted, or blacked out. There are only two known exceptions, most
likely mistakes.
This is a book about government projects and operations that have been
hidden for decades, some for good reasons, others for arguably terrible ones, and
one that should never have happened at all. These operations took place in the
name of national security and they all involved cutting-edge science. The last
published words of Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, were
“Science is not everything. But science is very beautiful.” After reading this
book, readers can decide what they think about what Oppenheimer said.
This is a book about black operations, government projects that are secret from
Congress and secret from the people who make up the United States. To
understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today,
one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. The men who ran the
Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations. The atomic bomb was
the mother of all black projects and it is the parent from which all black
operations have sprung.
Building the bomb was the single most expensive engineering project in the
history of the United States. It began in 1942, and by the time the bomb was
tested, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New Mexico high desert
on July 16, 1945, the bomb’s price tag, adjusted for inflation, was
$28,000,000,000. The degree of secrecy maintained while building the bomb is
almost inconceivable. When the world learned that America had dropped an
atomic weapon on Hiroshima, no one was more surprised than the U.S.
Congress, none of whose members had had any idea it was being developed.
Vice President Harry Truman had been equally stunned to learn about the bomb
when he became president of the United States, on April 12, 1945. Truman had
been the chairman of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National
Defense Program when he was vice president, meaning he was in charge of
watching how money was spent during the war, yet he’d had no idea about the
atomic bomb until he became president and the information was relayed to him
by two men: Vannevar Bush, the president’s science adviser, and Henry L.
Stimson, the nation’s secretary of war. Bush was in charge of the Manhattan
Project, and Stimson was in charge of the war.
The Manhattan Project employed two hundred thousand people. It had eighty
offices and dozens of production plants spread out all over the country, including
a sixty-thousand-acre facility in rural Tennessee that pulled more power off the
nation’s electrical grid than New York City did on any given night. And no one
knew the Manhattan Project was there. That is how powerful a black operation
can be.
After the war ended, Congress—the legislators who had been so easily kept
in the dark for two and a half years—was given stewardship of the bomb. It was
now up to Congress to decide who would control its “unimaginable destructive
power.” With the passing of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, a terrifying and
unprecedented new system of secret-keeping emerged. The presidential system
was governed by presidential executive orders regarding national security
information. But the newly created Atomic Energy Commission, formerly
known as the Manhattan Project, was now in charge of regulating the
classification of all nuclear weapons information in a system that was totally
separate from the president’s system. In other words, for the first time in
American history, a federal agency run by civilians, the Atomic Energy
Commission, would maintain a body of secrets classified based on factors other
than presidential executive orders. It is from the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 that
the concept “born classified” came to be, and it was the Atomic Energy
Commission that would oversee the building of seventy thousand nuclear bombs
in sixty-five different sizes and styles. Atomic Energy was the first entity to
control Area 51—a fact previously undisclosed—and it did so with terrifying
and unprecedented power. One simply cannot consider Area 51’s uncensored
history without addressing this cold, hard, and ultimately devastating truth.
The Atomic Energy Commission’s Restricted Data classification was an even
more terrifying anomaly, something that could originate outside the government
through the “thinking and research of private parties.” In other words, the
Atomic Energy Commission could hire a private company to conduct research
for the commission knowing that the company’s thinking and research would be
born classified and that even the president of the United States would not
necessarily have a need-to-know about it. In 1994, for instance, when President
Clinton created by executive order the Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments to look into secrets kept by the Atomic Energy
Commission, certain records involving certain programs inside and around Area
51 were kept from the president on the grounds that he did not have a need-to-
know. Two of these programs, still classified, are revealed publicly for the first
time in this book.
One of the Atomic Energy Commission’s former classifications officers,
Donald Woodbridge, characterized the term born classified as something that
“give[s] the professional classificationist unanswerable authority.” Area 51 lives
on as an example. Of the Atomic Energy Commission’s many facilities across
the nation—it is now called the Department of Energy—the single largest
facility is, and always has been, the Nevada Test Site. Other parts of the Nevada
Test and Training Range would be controlled by the Department of Defense. But
there were gray areas, like Area 51—craggy mountain ranges and flat, dry lake
beds sitting just outside the official borders of the Nevada Test Site and not
controlled by the Department of Defense. These areas are where the most secret
projects were set up. No one had a need-to-know about them.
And for decades, until this book was published, no one would.